Books Recommended by Jeff Bezos

When you’re talking about shopping online, you’re automatically talking about Amazon. And you can’t mention Amazon without thinking about the man behind the most valuable retailer in the United States. And that’s Jeff Bezos.

Born in 1964 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, showed his interest in science and technology from an early age. In 1986 he graduated from Princeton and then had several jobs in New York in the computer science field.

In 1994, attracted by the rapid growth of Internet, Bezos quit his job as VP of D.E. Shaw & Co. and moved to Seattle. During the cross-country drive from New York to Seattle he wrote the business plan for an online book store that was called Cadabra. After a lawyer pointed out to him that the name sounds pretty similar to “cadaver”, he decided to change the name to Amazon, inspired by the Amazon river. It’s the biggest river in the world and he planned for his store to become the biggest in the world.

More than 20 years later, Amazon became a tech giant that sells almost anything you can think of. It’s considered the largest retailer in the world by both revenue and market cap. It also produces electronic devices (such as Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV and Echo).

Other business ventures include Blue Origin, a human spaceflight company that Bezos founded in 2000. They’re expected to start commercial space flights in 2018. In 2013 he bought The Washington Post for $250 million. He’s also an investor, being one of the early investors in Google. His investment of $250,000 is now valued at $3.3 billion. Through his personal investment company, Bezos Expeditions, he helped fund companies like Airbnb, Basecamp, Behance, Business Insider, Twitter and Uber.

Even though his media presence is nowhere near other top level entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates, Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, on several occasions Jeff Bezos has talked about books that he finds time to read.